Warning - incoming! Ubuntu is succeeding in winning hearts & souls towards the desktop, at least partially due to wider device support on various vendors HW as a *supported* OS. This could be partially due to he "sugar-daddy" phenom of Mark Shuttlesworth saying it doesn't really have to make a profit for 3 - 5 years, e.g., compared to Redhat's server emphasis. If one searches for "ncsu ubuntu" there are local mirror(s) on
campus.
- Marhn Fullmer

On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Jack Neely wrote:

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 03:02:08PM -0500, Alexander Ray wrote:

Speaking of the Realm project, has there been any headway at diversifying
the distributions?

Gah...I never replied to this.  Sorry.

Diversifying distributions.  Not really...I haven't been asked for much
with other distributions.  I know that ubuntu would be one place I'd
like to be as well as Fedora.  But there is lots of churn.  I wouldn'd
mind providing some facilities to do it, but it would need to be
primarily in someone else's hands.

One of the projects rattling around in my head is being able to deploy a
real configuration management system, most likely Bcfg2.  This may be a
repository that we can collectively work together on to maintain what
each realm linux distribution looks like and keep things in sync more or
less.

Of course, there are some complications to using Bcfg2 as admins need
access to add their own configuration bits, however one group of admins
should probably be partitioned off from another group.  (A concept
called Distributed Administration...insert system administration theory
here.)  So there is some work to do before we get there.

Bryan just recently gave an informative presentation on how to get AFS set
up under a Debian-based system, and I know Dr. Jasper still has an AFS build
for Fedora.

Yeah...it would be great to have these more in the loop...but at least
for Fedora, the churn normally keeps me out due to time.  Like dealing
with the recent email mess...anyone on uni44map?

Jack

Where do we want to go with this? and what kind of support would we need?

~A

--
Jack Neely < jjneely@ncsu.[redacted] >
Linux Czar, OIT Campus Linux Services
Office of Information Technology, NC State University
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